Native Tongue

  In the darkness Carrie Lanier took a deep breath and said: “I hope that’s you.”

  “It’s me,” Joe Winder said.

  “Was that a gun I saw?”

  “I’m afraid so. My situation has taken a turn for the worse.”

  Carrie said, “That’s why I came.”

  Winder led her back to the living room, where they sat between two large cardboard boxes. The only light was the amber glow from the stereo receiver; Carrie Lanier could barely hear the music from the speakers.

  “Where’s your girlfriend?” she asked.

  “Moved out.”

  “I’m sorry.” She paused; then, peering at him: “Is that a beret?”

  “Panties,” Joe Winder said. “Can you believe it—that’s all she left me. Cheap ones, too. The mail-order crap she sold over the phone.” He pulled the underwear off his head to show her the shoddy stitching.

  “You’ve had a rough time,” said Carrie Lanier. “I didn’t know she’d moved out.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m doing just fine. Adjusting beautifully to the single life. Sitting here in a dark apartment with a gun in my lap and underpants on my head.”

  Carrie squeezed his arm. “Joe, are you on drugs?”

  “Nope,” he said. “Pretty amazing, isn’t it?”

  “I think you should come home with me.”

  “Why?”

  “Because bad things will happen if you stay here.”

  “Ah.” Winder scooped the bullets off the windowsill and fed them into the gun clip. “You must be talking about Pedro Luz.”

  “It’s all over the Magic Kingdom,” Carrie said, “about the reasons you were fired.”

  “Mr. X doesn’t kill all his former employees, does he?”

  She leaned closer. “It’s no joke. The word is, you’re number one on Pedro’s list.”

  “So that’s the word.”

  “Joe, I get around. Spend the day in a raccoon suit, people forget there’s a real person inside. I might as well be invisible—the stuff I pick up, you wouldn’t believe.”

  “The spy wore a tail! And now you hear Pedro’s irritated.”

  “I got it from two of the other guards on lunch break. They were doing blow behind the Magic Mansion.”

  Winder was struck by how wonderful Carrie looked, her eyes all serious in the amber light. Impulsively he kissed her on the cheek. “Don’t worry about me,” he said. “You can go home.”

  “You aren’t listening.”

  “Yes, I—”

  “No, you aren’t.” Her tone was one of motherly disapproval. “I warned you about this before. About sticking your nose where it doesn’t belong.”

  “You did, yes.”

  “Last time you were lucky. You truly were.”

  “I suppose so.” Joe Winder felt oppressively tired. Suddenly the handgun weighed a ton. He slid it across the carpet so forcefully that it banged into the baseboard of the opposite wall.

  Carrie Lanier told him to hurry and pack some clothes.

  “I can’t leave,” he said. “Nina might call.”

  “Joe, it’s not just Pedro you’ve got to worry about. It’s the police.”

  Winder’s chin dropped to his chest. “Already?”

  “Mr. X swore out a warrant this afternoon,” Carrie said. “I heard it from his secretary.”

  Francis Kingsbury’s secretary was a regular visitor to The Catacombs, where she was conducting an athletic love affair with the actor who portrayed Bartholomew, the most shy and bookish of Uncle Ely’s Elves.

  Carrie said, “She mentioned something about destruction of private property.”

  “There was an incident,” Joe Winder acknowledged, “but no shots were fired.”

  Under his supervision, the two bulldozers had torn down the three-dimensional billboard that proclaimed the future home of the Falcon Trace Golf and Country Club. The bulldozers also had demolished the air-conditioned double-wide trailer (complete with beer cooler and billiard table) that served as an on-site office for the construction company. They had even wrecked the PortO-Lets, trapping one of the foremen with his anniversary issue of Hustler magazine.

  Afterwards Joe Winder had encouraged the bulldozer operators to remove their clothing, which he’d wadded in the neck of the gas tanks. Then—after borrowing the smartass driver’s cigarette lighter—Joe Winder had suggested that the men aim their powerful machines toward the Atlantic Ocean, engage the forward gear and swiftly exit the cabs. Later he had proposed a friendly wager on which of the dozers would blow first.

  “They spotted the flames all the way from Homestead Air Base,” Carrie Lanier reported. “Channel 7 showed up in a helicopter, so Kingsbury made Chelsea write up a press release.”

  “A freak construction accident, no doubt.”

  “Good guess. I’ve got a Xerox in my purse.”

  “No thanks.” Joe Winder wasn’t in the mood for Chelsea’s golden lies. He stood up and stretched; joints and sockets popped in protest. Lights began to flash blue, green and red on the bare wall, and Winder assumed it was fatigue playing tricks with his vision.

  He squinted strenuously, and the lights disappeared. When he opened his eyes, the lights were still strobing. “Shit, here we go.” Winder went to the window and peeked through the curtain.

  “How many?” Carrie asked.

  “Two cops, one car.”

  “Is there another way out?”

  “Sure,” he said.

  They heard the tired footsteps on the front walk, the deep murmur of conversation, the crinkle of paper. In the crack beneath the door they saw the yellow flicker of flashlight as the policemen examined the warrant one more time, probably double-checking the address.

  Winder picked up the semiautomatic and arranged it in his waistband. Carrie Lanier followed him to the kitchen, where they slipped out the back door just as the cops got serious with their knocking. Once outside, in the pale blue moonlight, she deftly grabbed the gun from Joe Winder’s trousers and put it in her handbag.

  “In case you go stupid on me,” she whispered.

  “No chance of that,” he said. “None at all.”

  20

  A thin coil of copper dangled by a string from Carrie Lanier’s rearview mirror. Joe Winder asked if it was some type of hieroglyphic emblem.

  “It’s an IUD,” said Carrie, without taking her eyes off the road. “A reminder of my ex-husband.”

  “I like it.” Winder tried to beef up the compliment. “It’s better than fuzzy dice.”

  “He wanted to have babies,” Carrie explained, shooting into the left lane and passing a cement truck. “A baby boy and a baby girl. House with a white picket fence and a big backyard. Snapper riding mower. Golden retriever named Champ. He had it all planned.”

  Joe Winder said, “Sounds pretty good, except for the golden. Give me a Lab any day.”

  “Well, he wanted to get me pregnant,” Carrie went on. “Every night, it was like a big routine. So I’d say sure, Roddy, whatever you want, let’s make a baby. I never told him about wearing the loop. And every month he’d want to know. ‘Did we do it, sweetie? Is there a zygote?’ And I’d say ‘Sorry, honey, guess we’d better try harder.’”

  “Roddy was his name? That’s a bad sign right there.”

  “He was a screamer, all right.”

  “What happened?” Winder asked. “Is he still around?”

  “No, he’s not.” Carrie hit the intersection at Highway 1 without touching the brakes, and merged neatly into the northbound traffic. She said, “Roddy’s up at Eglin doing a little time.”

  “Which means he’s either a drug dealer or a crooked lawyer.”

  “Both,” she said. “Last month he sent a Polaroid of him with a tennis trophy. He said he can’t wait to get out and start trying for a family again.”

  “The boy’s not well.”

  “It’s all Oedipal, that’s my theory.” Carrie nodded at the IUD and said, “I keep it there to remind myself that you
can’t be too careful when it comes to men. Here’s Roddy with his Stanford diploma and his fancy European car and his heavy downtown law firm, everything in the whole world going for him. Turns out he’s nothing but a dipshit, and a dumb dipshit to boot.”

  Winder said she’d been smart to take precautions.

  “Yeah, well, I had my career to consider.” Carrie turned a corner into a trailer park, and coasted the car to the end of a narrow gravel lane. “Home sweet home,” she said. “Be sure to lock your door. This is not a wonderful neighborhood.”

  Joe Winder said, “Why are you doing this for me?”

  “I’m not sure. I’m really not.” She tossed him the keys and asked him to get the raccoon costume from the trunk of the car.

  Bud Schwartz and Danny Pogue helped Molly McNamara up the steps of the old house in South Miami. They eased her into the rocker in the living room, and opened the front windows to air the place out. Bud Schwartz’s hand still throbbed from the gunshot wound, but his fingers seemed to be functioning.

  Danny Pogue said, “Ain’t it good to be home?”

  “Indeed it is,” said Molly. “Could you boys fix me some tea?”

  Bud Schwartz looked hard at his partner. “I’ll do it,” said Danny Pogue. “It don’t bother me.” Cheerfully he hobbled toward the kitchen.

  “He’s not a bad young man,” Molly McNamara said. “Neither of you are.”

  “Model citizens,” said Bud Schwartz. “That’s us.”

  He lowered himself into a walnut captain’s chair but stood again quickly, as if the seat were hot. He’d forgotten about the damn thing in his pocket until it touched him in the right testicle. Irritably he removed it from his pants and placed it on an end table. He had wrapped it in a blue lace doily.

  He said, “Can we do something with this, please?”

  “There’s a Mason jar in the cupboard over the stove,” Molly said, “and some pickle juice in the refrigerator.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “This is important, Bud. It’s evidence.”

  In the hall he passed Danny Pogue carrying a teapot on a silver tray. “You believe this shit?” Bud Schwartz said. He held up the doily.

  “What now?”

  “She wants me to pickle the goddamn thing!”

  Danny Pogue made a squeamish face. “What for?” When he returned to the living room, Molly was rocking tranquilly in the chair. He poured the tea and said, “You must be feeling better.”

  “Better than I look.” She drank carefully, watching Danny Pogue over the rim of the cup. In a tender voice she said: “You don’t know what this means to me, the fact that you stayed to help.”

  “It wasn’t just me. It was Bud, too.”

  “He’s not a bad person,” Molly McNamara allowed. “I suspect he’s a man of principle, deep down.”

  Danny Pogue had never thought of his partner as a man of principle, but maybe Molly had spotted something. While Bud was an incorrigible thief, he played by a strict set of rules. No guns, no violence, no hard drugs—Danny Pogue supposed that these could be called principles. He hoped that Molly recognized that he, too, had his limits—moral borders he would not cross. Later on, when she was asleep, he would make a list.

  He said, “So what are you gonna do now? Stay at it?”

  “To tell the truth, I’m not certain.” She put down the teacup and dabbed her swollen lips with a napkin. “I’ve had some experts go over Kingsbury’s files. Lawyers, accountants, people sympathetic to the cause. They made up a cashflow chart, ran the numbers up and down and sideways. They say it’s all very interesting, these foreign companies, but it would probably take months for the IRS and Customs to sort it out; another year for an indictment. We simply don’t have that kind of time.”

  “Shoot,” said Danny Pogue. He hadn’t said “shoot” since the third grade, but he’d been trying to clean up his language in Molly’s presence.

  “I’m a little discouraged,” she went on. “I guess I’d gotten my hopes up prematurely.”

  Danny Pogue felt so lousy that he almost told her about the other files, about the blackmail scam that he and Bud Schwartz were running on the great Francis X. Kingsbury.

  He said, “There’s nothing we can do? Just let him go ahead and murder off them butterflies and snails?” Molly had given him a magazine clipping about the rare tropical snails of Key Largo.

  She said, “I didn’t say we’re giving up—”

  “Because we should talk to Bud. He’ll think a something.”

  “Every day we lose precious time,” Molly said. “Every day they’re that much closer to pouring the concrete.”

  Danny Pogue nodded. “Let’s talk to Bud. Bud’s sharp as a tack about stuff like this—”

  Molly stopped rocking and raised a hand. “I heard something, didn’t you?”

  From the kitchen came muffled percussions of a struggle—men grunting, something heavy hitting a wall, a jar breaking.

  Danny Pogue was shaking when he stood up. The bum foot made him think twice about running.

  “Hand me the purse,” Molly said. “I’ll need my gun.”

  But Danny Pogue was frozen to the pine floor. His eyelids fluttered and his arms stiffened at his side. All he could think was: Somebody’s killing Bud!

  “Danny, did you hear me? Get me my purse!”

  A block of orange appeared in the hallway. It was a tall man in a bright rainsuit and a moldy-looking shower cap. He had a damp silvery beard and black wraparound sunglasses and something red fastened to his neck. The man carried Bud Schwartz in a casual way, one arm around the midsection. Bud Schwartz was limp, gasping, flushed in the face.

  Danny Pogue’s tongue was as dry as plaster when the stranger stepped out of the shadow.

  “Oh, it’s you,” Molly McNamara said. “Now be careful, don’t hurt that young man.”

  The stranger dropped Bud Schwartz butt-first on the pine and said, “I caught him putting somebody’s fingertip in a Mason jar.”

  “I’m the one who told him to,” said Molly. “Now, Governor, you just settle down.”

  “What happened to you?” the stranger demanded. “Who did this to you, Miss McNamara?”

  He took off the sunglasses and glared accusingly at Danny Pogue, who emitted a pitiful hissing noise as he shook his head. Bud Schwartz, struggling to his feet, said: “It wasn’t us, it was some damn Cuban.”

  “Tell me a name,” said the stranger.

  “I don’t know,” said Molly McNamara, “but I got a good bite out of him.”

  “The finger,” Bud Schwartz explained, still gathering his breath.

  The stranger knelt beside the rocking chair and gently examined the raw-looking cuts and bruises on Molly’s face. “This is … intolerable.” He was whispering to himself and no one else. “This is barbarism.”

  Molly touched the visitor’s arm and said, “I’ll be all right. Really.”

  Bud Schwartz and Danny Pogue had seen men like this only in prison, and not many. Wild was the only way to describe the face … wild and driven and fearless, but not necessarily insane. It would be foolish, perhaps even fatal, to assume the guy was spaced.

  He turned to Bud Schwartz and said, “How about giving me that Cuban’s nub.”

  “I dropped it on the floor.” Bud Schwartz thought: Christ, he’s not going to make me go pick it up, is he?

  Danny Pogue said, “No sweat, I’ll find it.”

  “No,” said the man in the orange rainsuit. “I’ll grab it on the way out.” He squeezed Molly’s hand and stood up. “Will you be all right?”

  “Yes, they’re taking good care of me.”

  The stranger nodded at Bud Schwartz, who couldn’t help but notice that one of the man’s eyes was slipping out of the socket. The man calmly reinserted it.

  “I didn’t mean to hurt you,” he said to Bud Schwartz. “Well, actually, I did mean to hurt you.”

  Molly explained: “He didn’t know you fellows were my guests, that’s a
ll.”

  “I’ll be in touch,” said the stranger. He kissed Molly on the cheek and said he would check on her in a day or two. Then he was gone.

  Bud Schwartz waited until he heard the door slam. Then he said: “What the hell was that?”

  “A friend,” Molly replied. They had known each other a long time. She had worked as a volunteer in his gubernatorial campaign, whipping up both the senior-citizen vote and the environmental coalitions. Later, when he quit office and vanished, Molly was one of the few who knew what happened, and one of the few who understood. Over the years he had kept in touch in his own peculiar way—sometimes a spectral glimpse, sometimes a sensational entrance; jarring cameos that were as hair-raising as they were poignant.

  “Guy’s big,” said Danny Pogue. “Geez, he looks like—did he do time? What’s his story?”

  “We don’t want to know,” Bud Schwartz said. “Am I right?”

  “You’re absolutely right,” said Molly McNamara.

  Shortly before midnight on July 23, Jim Tile received a radio call that an unknown individual was shooting at automobiles on Card Sound Road. The trooper told the dispatcher he was en route, and that he’d notify the Monroe County Sheriff’s Office if he needed backups—which he knew he wouldn’t.

  The cars were lined up on the shoulder of the road a half-mile east of the big bridge. Jim Tile took inventory from the stickers on the bumpers: two Alamos, a Hertz, a National and an Avis. The rental firms had started putting bumper plates on all their automobiles, which served not only as advertisement but as a warning to local drivers that a disoriented tourist was nearby. On this night, though, the bright stickers had betrayed their unsuspecting drivers. Each of the vehicles bore a single .45-caliber bullet hole in the left-front fender panel.

  Jim Tile knew exactly what had happened. He took brief statements from the motorists, who seemed agitated by the suggestion that anyone would fire at them simply because they were tourists. Jim Tile assured them that this sort of thing didn’t happen every day. Then he called Homestead for tow trucks to get the three rental cars whose engine blocks had been mortally wounded by the sniper in the mangroves.